Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Publication Date: 2024
Text by Julie Otsuka. Contributions by Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, and Lily Stockman. Conversation between Joan Mitchell and Yves Michaud
Discover Joan Mitchell’s powerful and dynamic work—spotlighted in this book as never before “An entry for one of the best shows of 2022. . . . Mitchell, then in her 50s, reaches peak form in gathering brushstrokes that flicker and burn like auras on fire.” —Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine This highly anticipated publication focuses on the years 1979 to 1985—a significant and deeply generative period within Joan Mitchell’s decades-long career. As Mitchell became even more fully immersed in daily life at her property in Vétheuil, France—surrounded by lush gardens, and challenged and inspired by new creative relationships—her studio practice flourished and her work became even more ambitious and expansive. Executed in an increasingly bold palette, the works from this period exemplify Mitchell’s nuanced mastery of composition, scale, and color. In addition to her large-scale abstract works, this publication features numerous smaller paintings and a selection of archival materials. Included in the book are several texts that complement the illustrated works. A new essay by the bestselling author Julie Otsuka recollects her encounters with Mitchell’s paintings over the years. A fascinating conversation between Mitchell and the French philosopher Yves Michaud from 1986 is featured. Reflections by the artists Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, and Lily Stockman each explore a unique component of Mitchell’s oeuvre or practice, underscoring Mitchell’s continued influence on artists today.
Details
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artist: Joan Mitchell
Contributors: Yves Michaud, Julie Otsuka, Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, Lily Stockman
Publication Date: 2024
ISBN: 9781644231180
Retail: $60 | $80 CAN | £45
Designer: Neil Donnelly
Printer: VeronaLibri, Verona
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 9.25 × 12.5 in | 23.5 × 31.6 cm
Pages: 104
Reproductions: 51 illustrations
Artist and Contributors
Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four-decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and remarkable adeptness with color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time.
Yves Michaud
Yves Michaud is a French philosopher, writer, and professor emeritus of philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. In the 1970s, he began working as an art critic, developing relationships with contemporary artists of the time in Paris, including Joan Mitchell. Michaud has published widely on the relationships of the arts and culture in a globalized, technological world. From 1989 to 1997 he was the director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Julie Otsuka
Julie Otsuka is the award-winning and best-selling author of The Swimmers (2022), The Buddha in the Attic (2012), and When the Emperor Was Divine (2003). Her books have been awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the American Library Association Alex Award, among other distinctions.
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman is a painter and occasional art writer, whose 2020 collection of drawings and selected essays on art, Faux Pas, was published by After 8, Paris. She is represented in New York by Gladstone Gallery.
Shinique Smith
Shinique Smith is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Exploring ideas of transformation and ritual through materials such as fabric, clothing, and personal belongings, breath, bundling, collage, and gesture, Smith has built a complex visual vocabulary that resonates on intimate and social scales.
Lily Stockman
Lily Stockman is a Los Angeles–based painter. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs the American landscape for her distinctive palette of glowing, tertiary colors. Her essays have appeared in Vogue, the Iceland Review, Monocle, and books on artists, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, and the Orange County Museum of Art, among other institutions.
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